Content area
Full Text
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post Civil War North, 1865-1901. By Heather Cox Richardson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. 336 pp. Index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN 0-674-0063-2.
In 1959, Bernard Weisberger wrote a critical analysis in the Journal of Southern History entitled "The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography." The literature of the ensuing four decades has shed a great deal more light on that still controversial era of American history. With Eric McKitrick's Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, published the next year, historians began salvaging the once demonized Radical Republicans and dehumanized African Americans. Central to this historiographic revolution was Eric Foner's awardwinning Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 1877, published in 1988. Foner placed African Americans at the center of debate but made no effort to claim a completely original interpretation; he duly noted that, half a century before, W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America offered a similar point of view.
Now Heather Cox Richardson, author of a study of Republican economic ideology in the Civil War, has entered the debate with The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1 gol. Among her many claims to a different-and courageous-approach, she begins and ends with an analysis of Booker T. Washington, whom Du Bois criticized for urging African Americans to "cast down your bucket where you are" and at least momentarily to accept a degraded station. Richardson argues that Washington saw this as the road to betterment. She writes of his Atlanta address of 1895 that he "publicly reappropriated for African-Americans the Northern image of the traditional laborer, who would begin his career in the fields or at a manual craft, and would rebuild the South as he became part of a constantly rising middle class." She continues: "Reclaiming the Republican vision of African-Americans as traditional...