Originating in anti-Reconstruction propaganda of Southern Democrats during the 187Os, this traditional interpretation achieved scholarly legitimacy around the turn of the century through the work of William Dunning and his students at Columbia University. All told, Reconstruction was just about the darkest page in the American saga. After much needless suffering, the white community of the South banded together to overthrow these “black” governments and restore home rule (their euphemism for white supremacy). An orgy of corruption followed, presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers (Northerners who ventured south to reap the spoils of office), traitorous scalawags (Southern whites who cooperated with the new governments for personal gain), and the ignorant and childlike freedmen, who were incapable of properly exercising the political power that had been thrust upon them.
Motivated by an irrational hatred of Rebels or by ties with Northern capitalists out to plunder the South, the Radicals swept aside Johnson’s lenient program and fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy. President Andrew Johnson, his successor, attempted to carry out Lincoln’s policies but was foiled by the Radical Republicans (also known as Vindictives or Jacobins). The martyred Lincoln, according to this view, had planned a quick and painless readmission of the Southern states as equal members of the national family. If historians have not yet forged a fully satisfying portrait of Reconstruction as a whole, the traditional interpretation that dominated historical writing for much of this century has irrevocably been laid to rest.Īnyone who attended high school before 1960 learned that Reconstruction was an era of unrelieved sordidness in American political and social life.
Race relations, politics, social life, and economic change during Reconstruction have all been reinterpreted in the light of changed attitudes toward the place of blacks within American society.
IN THE PAST twenty years, no period of American history has been the subject of a more thoroughgoing réévaluation than Reconstruction-the violent, dramatic, and still controversial era following the Civil War. Political cartoons after the Civil War highlighted the divide in approach to Reconstruction between politicians like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.
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