Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Berlin, Ira
RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA'S UNFINISHED REVOLU TION, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. 690 pp. $29.95. Few periods of U.S. history have generated more debate than the Civil...
...And the people—they too were different...
...Instead, Foner presents a new way of thinking about the period...
...the former slaves, after all, were not simply workers, they were black workers...
...the factional battles within Congress and the various state legislatures...
...Unlike any previous study, Reconstruction finds a common ground to join questions as diverse as the reconstitution of the Afro-American family, the reshaping of the nationstate, and the struggle for women's rights with the traditional issues of Reconstruction history—banks, tariffs, corporate subsidies, and political equality...
...and the extraordinary violence and corruption of the era...
...No longer divided between free and slave, Americans were free workers all...
...history have generated more debate than the Civil War era and its aftermath, what Eric Foner calls "America's Unfinished Revolution...
...The struggle over the reconstitution of the Afro-American family and the remaking of the Afro-American church were as much questions of power as the struggle for land and the ballot...
...From this perspective, black people were the dynamic element in the drama of Reconstruction...
...These rights—freedom of church, school, politics, and family, together with the right to self-improvement—stood at the heart of the American idea of liberty in the middle of the nineteenth century...
...The liberation of some four million slaves and the identification of emancipation with the sanctity of the nation-state—the Union forever—placed the debate over the meaning of freedom at the center of American politics...
...It was precisely the absence of such rights that made slavery objectionable to white northerners, even those who carried no brief for racial equality...
...the contest between the president and Congress...
...First and foremost slavery had meant work, the forcible extraction of one person's labor for the benefit of another...
...No aspect of American life was unaffected...
...the remaking of the American economy...
...Reconstruction begins not with the war's end, but with emancipation, January 1, 1863...
...The fact that slaves believed that their freedom had to be predicated on access to some independent source of wealth— usually, but not always, land—fused the question of labor with the question of American nationality, even after it became clear that there would be no forty acres and a mule...
...They add to an already formidable literature, which has focused on the epic struggle between Abraham Lincoln, then on Andrew Johnson and the congressional Radicals in Washington and finally on carpetbaggers, scalawags, newly enfranchised blacks, and unreconstructed rebels in the SPRING • 1989 • 281 South...
...The last two decades have seen the publication of numerous studies of the Reconstruction era, many of them models of the new history in their desire to give all participants— former slaves as well as former masters—a full hearing...
...Those who denigrate the attempt to create a more inclusive, hence more democratic, history might read Reconstruction to see how the addition of a new protagonist does not simply enlarge historical understanding but transforms it...
...The revolution wrought by emancipation was unfinished, at least for some...
...Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, does this by drawing together the scholarship of the last twenty years and by adding his own views, informed by a close reading of thousands of letters, speeches, pamphlets, and tens of thousands of pages of newsprint...
...SPRING • 1989 • 283...
...A historian could spend a good part of his or her scholarly life mastering the literature on Reconstruction in a single state...
...Synthesis is not merely consolidation...
...The counterrevolutionary terror that came to characterize political life in the former Confederate states itself testified to the radical changes that emancipation had set in motion...
...Foner's interpretation also puts into perspective the recent debate about the differences between so-called social history, which emphasizes matters of "culture," and political history, which addresses questions of "power," by demonstrating that culture and power are inseparable...
...Would the newly freed slaves be wage workers or proprietors...
...The death of slavery forced the American people to confront the issue of labor...
...For if slavery's demise instantly made slaves into employees and masters into employers, before long the same process would similarly transform yeomen farmers and artisans, crossroad storekeepers, and even substantial merchants and manufacturers...
...Understanding Reconstruction as a revolutionary alteration of social relations also explains the extraordinary opposition it called forth...
...Indeed, from his own premises, Foner would have done better to start even earlier, for the beginning of the Civil War marked the beginning of the end of chattel bondage...
...For him, Reconstruction is not a southern question, and he does not confine his analysis to the South, although he rightly identifies the former Confederacy as the cockpit of the struggle...
...The tortured path of racial ideology in the United States—the waning of wartime egalitarianism, the revival of the Lost Cause, the growth of segregation, and the triumph of the civil rights movement—has inspired waves of revisionism, so much so that the "revisionist" Reconstruction historians have themselves been revised several times...
...The nation's economy was reworked through an overhaul of its institutional infrastructure—banks, corporations, transportation, and communication—and an expansion of its superstructure, paving the way for the growth of industrial capitalism...
...The inability to control one's own labor reduced such a person to dependency...
...Lincoln himself appeared to have embraced this notion and made much of it in his celebration of the ability of poor men—like himself—to gain, over the course of their lives, an independent, property-based livelihood...
...Foner's perspective gives the very period of Reconstruction a new shape...
...The period has gone from being a heroic era to a tragic one and back again, with the sources and meaning of tragedy redefined with each turn of the ideological screw...
...The years between 1863 and 1877 saw a radical alteration of the relationship between capital and labor...
...But one of Foner's major contributions is the treatment of race as a social construction that changes as the terrain of the political debate shifts...
...The nation-state itself—greatly enlarged by the war and the process of supervising the peace—was transformed, clearing the way for the elevation of the United States to the status of a world power...
...Central to Foner's vision is the struggle over the control of labor in an emerging capitalist order—a debate over the very meaning of "free labor...
...It was the ability of former slaves to articulate their own understanding of freedom that gives the era its meaning...
...For Foner, race was part of the evolving historical landscape, not just a question or problem that white politicians debated...
...He gives coherence to the various fragments of the Reconstruction puzzle: the social transformation of slaves into a free people...
...But even as Lincoln articulated the ideal of an independent, propertied citizenry, such a citizenry was being replaced by one that worked only for wages and had no access to productive property...
...By seeing emancipation both as a product and an intensification of the struggle over labor, Foner is able to integrate the disparate elements of the postemancipation years...
...In Foner's view, Afro-American history becomes not simply another side car of American life, but its main engine...
...Americans, white as well as black, came to realize that in deciding the slaves' future, they were shaping their own destiny...
...But if everyone was free, the meaning of freedom had been altered...
...These works themselves rest upon a monographic mountain of biographies, state and local histories, and institutional analyses...
...As the history of Reconstruction has been retold, heroes have become villains and villains restored to grace...
...The balance of power within the United States shifted, opening the way for a century of northern dominance...
...What emerges from Foner's Reconstruction is not simply the same story on a larger screen or a recasting of heroes and villains...
...As it changed, so did American society...
...Indeed, in many ways, the debate over the meaning of free labor in the North was as important as that in the South, and one wishes that Foner had taken his own good advice 282 • DISSENT Books and given as much space to events in Pennsylvania and Ohio as to those in Alabama and Mississippi...
...Foner also expands the geography of Reconstruction...
...Americans who smirk at the rewriting of Soviet schoolbooks would find .rereading the "Reconstruction" section of their own high school texts a sobering experience...
...Thereafter those who believed access to an independent livelihood should be part of citizenship would be fighting a rearguard action...
...To complicate matters further, multiple variations of each of these genres exist...
...Reconstruction in no way diminishes the importance of racial identification as a force of social cohesion or opposition...
...Foner's understanding of Reconstruction as a struggle over labor will doubtless jar those who have come to think of the period in terms of the question of race—the struggle between the forces of white supremacy and racial equality...
...By definition, such people could not enjoy an independent family, religious, or political life, and they lacked the means to better themselves...
...From their perspective, to work for wages was to be less than free...
...For many Americans, however, freedom did not stop with the right to control one's own labor...
...And few periods have been subject to more intense investigation...
...The great strength of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution is that it addresses the period as a whole...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
