Read Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Online
Authors: Allen C. Guelzo
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #U.S.A., #v.5, #19th Century, #Political Science, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Military History, #American History, #History
Reconstruction also enjoys a substantial and surprisingly colorful bibliographical history. William A. Dunning, in
Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), portrayed Reconstruction as a fanatical and utopian coup, launched by the Radical Republicans in violation of Lincoln’s intentions and carried out by a hungry swarm of political vultures known as carpetbaggers and their incompetent black allies. Dunning never lacked for critics among black historians, especially W. E. B. Du Bois and John Hope Franklin. But it was the publication of Kenneth Stampp’s
The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877
(New York: Knopf, 1965) that decisively turned the “Dunning School” on its head. Stampp, influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1950s, sharply revised the reputation of Radicals and the carpetbaggers and placed the
entire Reconstruction effort on the same high moral ground occupied by Martin Luther King Jr. Thirty years later, Stampp’s terse and comparatively short book is still in many ways the best introduction to Reconstruction. Stampp has enjoyed many followers, but none has towered so greatly above the rest as Eric Foner, whose
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988) expands Stampp’s focus to include wartime Reconstruction and other political and economic national developments. Yet a third departure from both Dunning and Stampp lies in Heather Cox Richardson’s treatment of Reconstruction as a conflict in political economy in
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) and in her expansion of the scope of Reconstruction policies, in
West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), to the western territories, which were, after all, the flash point of the controversies which provoked the War.
Andrew Johnson has attracted little favorable press, but he has enjoyed a number of able biographies. Albert Castel’s
The Presidency of Andrew Johnson
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1979) and Eric L. McKitrick’s highly critical
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) both offer useful surveys of Johnson’s presidential policies, while Hans L. Trefousse’s
Andrew Johnson: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) sets him clearly in the ideological world of the Democratic Party. Michael Les Benedict in
The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) and David O. Stewart in
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009) offer detailed accounts of the first presidential impeachment. The subsequent fate of Reconstruction in individual states has been treated in a growing list of local studies, including Joe Gray Taylor’s
Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), C. Peter Ripley’s
Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), Joseph G. Dawson’s
Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862–1877
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), Stephen V. Ash’s
Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988) and
When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Richard Zuczek’s
State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), Margaret M. Storey’s
Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), and Mark L. Bradley’s
Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).
A number of the participants in Reconstruction have earned their own biographies. Richard N. Current offers an elegant and determinedly revisionist collective biography of the major Southern Republicans in
Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins in
The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881
(University: University of Alabama Press, 1977), and James A. Baggett in
The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003) do likewise for the scalawags. The Southern opposition to Reconstruction has also had its students and its books, especially Nicholas Lemann in
Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and Michael Perman in
Reunion Without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and
The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), where Perman (as opposed to C. Vann Woodward) stresses the continuities between the prewar planter class and the agrarian-based opposition to Reconstruction. Individual leaders of Southern resistance have earned biographical attention from Edward G. Longacre in
Gentleman and Soldier: A Biography of Wade Hampton III
(Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 2009) and Ralph Lowell Eckert in
John Brown Gordon: Soldier, Southerner, American
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1989). Racial violence in Southern resistance to Reconstruction is handled in George C. Rable,
But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) and LeeAnna Keith,
The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
The various roles carved out by the freedpeople in the Reconstruction South are examined in Leon Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York: Knopf, 1979), Thomas Holt,
Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), and Joel Williamson,
After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).
Abaco Reef, Bahamas,
280
abolition of slavery,
42–48
,
158
,
174
,
177
,
235
,
379
,
384–85
,
452
,
453
,
471
,
524
and West Indian emancipation,
174
African Americans,
158
,
172
,
185
,
232–33
,
235
,
236
,
244
,
245
,
265
,
356
,
371
,
374
,
375–86
,
395
,
398
,
400–401
,
486–87
,
489–90
,
492–93
,
494
,
503–4
,
505
,
507
,
509
,
524
,
526–27
,
531
and “black laws,”
386
and civil rights,
382–86
and “Hannibal Guards,”
183
“Jim Crow” laws,
511
Aiken, Warren,
363
Alabama,
129
,
130
,
131
,
190
,
195
,
308
,
318
,
319
,
326
,
346
,
353
,
357
,
363
,
396
,
421
,
490
,
497
,
516
and Winston County,
367
Alamo, the,
60
Albany, New York,
459
Alexander, E. Porter,
469
Alexandria, Louisiana,
243
Alton, Illinois,
49
Amelia Court House, Virginia,
476–77
American Equal Rights Association,
403
American Revolution,
6
,
8
,
9
,
10
,
11
,
16
,
23
,
24
,
42
,
43
,
44
,
45
,
49
,
53
,
59
,
147
,
164
,
165
,
187
,
268
,
289
,
390
and “Ethiopian Regiment,”
43
Ammen, Jacob,
246
Andrews, Fanny,
33
Annapolis, Maryland,
144
Antietam, battle of (1862),
170
,
179
,
270
,
276
,
295
,
299
,
328
,
338
,
339
,
365
,
397
Appalachian Mountains,
203
Appomattox Station, Virginia,
478
Arapaho (tribe),
388
Army of Northern Virginia (C.S.),
259
,
291
,
327
,
329
,
333
,
334
,
335
,
340
,
345
,
346
,
367
,
371
,
412
,
415
,
423–26
,
428–29
,
431
,
434
,
442
,
468–69
,
470
,
475
,
476
,
479–80
Army of the Cumberland (U.S.),
347
,
348
,
351
,
353
,
354
,
365
,
415
,
421
,
424
,
440
Army of the James (U.S.),
426
Army of the Ohio (U.S.),
440
Army of the Potomac (U.S.),
156
,
159
,
164
,
168
,
185
,
259
,
263
,
265
,
266
,
268
,
271
,
315
,
327
,
329
,
330
,
331
,
334
,
342
,
343–44
,
355
,
402
,
475
,
476
,
479