Need Recommendation for Books About The Reconstruction Era (Vanity)

2/15/10 | self

[dajeeps]

I'm doing self-study about the political history of the civil war and I'm up to the late 1840's so far. I have the "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era" (Oxford History of the United States) by James M. McPherson on its way, but it ends as the Reconstruction Era is starting. There are so many on the subject it's impossible to know which are worth my time.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks a bunch in advance!

[Safrguns]

How about... “When liberals fought for slavery”?

[cripplecreek]

Looking for worthwhile books about the reconstruction era.

[cumbo78]

“The Era of Reconstruction” by Kenneth Stampp is one I use in my AP Class.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Stay away from Eric Foner’s book on the subject, he’s a classic lefty revisionist IMO.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Agreed on Stampp.

[robomatik]

"I'm doing self-study about the political history of the

civil war and I'm up to the late 1840's..."

huh? come again?

[La Lydia]

One of the most interesting episodes after the Civil War was the contested election of 1876 — Hayes/Tilden. Lloyd Robinson’s book was pretty good, I hear it has been updated since he first wrote it, but I haven’t gotten around to reading the latest version. There are a bunch of books on this, read the reviews and chose one that sounds appealing. The actual compromise was fascinating. Throws much light on 20th century history, too.

[achilles2000]

The revisionism started as early as 1930’s, but Foner is among the worst.

Here is the best place to start (see James Ford Rhodes’ book at the link): http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/0226710564

[achilles2000]

The revisionism started as early as 1930’s, but Foner is among the worst.

Here is the best place to start (see James Ford Rhodes’ book at the link): http://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/0226710564

We have become so afraid of the issue of “race” that there is very little written recently that is honest. Rhodes was the definitive account until th eleft had the power to force it down the memory hole and replace it with a liberal/marxist “narrative”.

[robomatik]

oh! i'm guessing you mean the political situation leading to the civil war?

[Joe 6-pack]

If you would like a deeply researched, quasi-fictional account of the time period, try this...

The author, Ron Gomez, owned a few radio stations in Louisiana before entering the state legislature (as a Republican, lol), after which he wrote his first book, My Name Is Ron, and I Am A Recovering Legislator.

Gomez's grandfather was born in the ealry 1850's and lived over 100 years. Gomez grew up hearing a few anecdotes from across his grandfather's life and with some research and extrapolation, connected the dots between. Neat is the result, and in addition to being a pretty good story in its own right, really gives a feel for the Reconstruction Era, and Gomez the historian introduces some chapters with some pretty elaborate fact based asides about the state and regional politics to set the backdrop for the story.

[LS]

One of the best remains Kenneth Stampp, “The Era of Reconstruction.” Libertarian Jeffrey R. Hummel has a good book (if you get past the Lincoln bashing), called “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.” I forget the author, but there is one called the “Era of Good Stealings” that focuses on the North and corruption. And the classic is C. Vann Woodward, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” as well as his narrower “Reunion and Reaction.” A more traditional, “conservative” view is in David Donald, “Civil War and Reconstruction.”

[iowamark]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120251929772555705.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#printMode
Five Best: These works capture the hope and turmoil of the post-Civil War period By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY
1. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877
By Kenneth M. Stampp
Knopf, 1965

For the better part of a century few American historians questioned the standard picture of Reconstruction as a dark chapter of corrupt and oppressive misrule, when radical Republicans seeking partisan advantage and personal plunder wreaked terrible vengeance on a prostrate South. Kenneth M. Stampp was one of the first historians to take on these myths in a comprehensive fashion, and 43 years later his book remains fresh and startling. In New York City alone, he notes, “the thefts of public funds by white Tammany Democrats surpassed the total thefts in all the southern states combined.” The new Southern state constitutions — reviled by the white old guard as the work of Northern “outcasts,” “ignorant and depraved negroes,” and “renegade” Southern whites — were in fact models of progressive reform, advancing the rights of women, establishing public education and ending the monopoly on power by wealthy landowners. (In South Carolina, voters got to cast ballots for governor and president for the first time.) And far from suffering oppression, the defeated South was treated with a mildness unprecedented for instigators of unsuccessful rebellions throughout history. No Confederate officeholder or soldier was ever charged with treason; almost none even lost property except for emancipated slaves; and within a few years former Confederate leaders were back serving as state governors, U.S. senators and congressmen, and cabinet officials.

2. The South As It Is, 1865-1866
By John Richard Dennett
Viking, 1965

In June 1865, just two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, John Richard Dennett, a young Harvard graduate, boarded a steamer in New York City for Richmond and began an eight-month journey through the Southern states. In Dennett’s letters, printed each week in the Nation magazine, the mood of the defeated Confederacy emerges in a series of remarkable portraits — blacks and whites, apprehensive Unionists and defiant secessionists, dirt-poor farmers and still wealthy plantation owners. Dennett’s vivid reports, which were collected and published on the centenary of the war’s conclusion, are shaded by cinematically evocative descriptions of the often bleak landscapes he traversed and an ever-present drumbeat of violence and menace. With a prescience that the following years would only confirm, Dennett saw that the ex-Confederates considered themselves overpowered but undefeated, sorry for nothing but their ill success and determined to keep the freedmen in a condition as close to slavery as possible. “Let the black man vote,” a Virginia merchant warned him, “and the Southern people will have to be kept down by a standing army.”

3. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers
By Richard Nelson Current
Oxford, 1988

“In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. The way in which they have reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.” So said Albion Tourgée in 1879, ruefully looking back on his courageous, but ultimately futile, fight as a judge in North Carolina battling the Ku Klux Klan and seeking justice for the freedmen. Tourgée, an Ohioan, is one of 10 notable Northerners who settled in the South after the war and whose experiences are described in “Those Terrible Carpetbaggers.” The intercuts between subjects in this big, sprawling, jumbly book can be hard to follow, but Richard Nelson Current — a pioneering historian who devoted a lifetime to re-examining the myths of Reconstruction — makes up for that shortcoming by offering a richness of detail and human dimension missing from the stereotypes of rapacious carpetbaggers. Current tells the story of Reconstruction through the eyes of those who believed in what they were doing and expected to succeed; it says much about the way the history of this era was so dominated by Reconstruction’s foes that this still seems like a novel approach.

4. Yazoo
By Albert T. Morgan
1884

One of the men whose struggles Richard Nelson Current chronicled was Albert T. Morgan, a Union veteran who settled in Yazoo, Miss., and thought that he would make a living as a cotton grower and lumber-mill operator. “Although at that time I was only a beginner in the study of the customs and laws of Yazoo,” Morgan wrote in an account of that time, “I was fully aware of the fact that it has always been unlawful to teach a negro to read and write.” The Northerner was cordially welcomed into local white society — until he started a school for the children of the freedmen who worked his land and until he began counseling young black women in his employ to stop letting themselves be kept as concubines by the town’s “respectable” white men. Then all hell broke loose. Things became a hundred times worse when Morgan was elected sheriff with the support of the local blacks and married a “colored” woman. In the tumultuous election of 1875 armed whites forcibly seized power and lynched a half-dozen black leaders; Morgan barely escaped with his life. His memoir is naïve and wise, beautiful and tragic, innocent and bitter — an amazing tale of a man a century ahead of his time.

5. Reconstruction
By Eric Foner
Harper & Row, 1988

“Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship,” Eric Foner writes early in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.” “From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development.” If there is a scrap of paper from the Reconstruction era that Mr. Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, hasn’t personally looked at, it would be hard to imagine. This beautifully written book is jaw-droppingly comprehensive, weaving countless telling details into its discussion of all the political, economic and social complexities of the era.

Mr. Budiansky is the author of “The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox,” which has just been published by Viking.
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[achilles2000]

By the way, the link I gave you was to only one of the books in the series. I believe that there are 7 volumes.

[dajeeps]

The book I’m currently reading starts at the conclusion of the War of 1812 and goes through 1848. I started back that far because I want to get context of how politics and economics was evolving before I jumped right into the hostilities. I want to get a good understanding of how much that nagging problem affected politics up to that point and how it lead to the fracturing of the Union.

[Deaf Smith]

The History Channel was to do a series on the Reconstruction about two years ago.

Aired one episode on NE Texas and left it at that.

[Eepsy]

Is amazon down for anybody else? I tried looking for one of these and I keep getting a 404.

[RVN Airplane Driver]

ping

[Fiji Hill]

For an authoritative and provocative essay on constitutionalism and the role of government set against the background of secession, war and reconstruction, read The American Republic by Orestes A. Brownson (New York: O' Shea, 1865). A reprint is available from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.