Even more disturbing, at least in the view of those who still controlled the plantation regions of the South, was the emergence of local officials, black and white, who sympathized with the plight of the black laborer. The spectacle of black men voting and holding office was anathema to large numbers of Southern whites. This perception helps explain the ferocity of the attacks leveled against them and the pervasiveness of violence in the postemancipation South. Yet their opponents did perceive the Reconstruction governments in precisely this wayas representatives of a revolution that had put the bottom rail, both racial and economic, on top.
While their achievements in such realms as education, civil rights, and the economic rebuilding of the South are now widely appreciated, historians today believe they failed to affect either the economic plight of the emancipated slave or the ongoing transformation of independent white farmers into cotton tenants. A new system of labor, social, racial, and political relations had to be created to replace slavery.įew modern scholars believe the Reconstruction governments established in the South in 18 fulfilled the aspirations of their humble constituents. Its demise threw open the most fundamental questions of economy, society, and politics. Plantation slavery was simultaneously a system of labor, a form of racial domination, and the foundation upon which arose a distinctive ruling class within the South. the focal point of Reconstruction was the social revolution known as emancipation.
a new portrait of Reconstruction ought to begin by viewing it not as a specific time period, bounded by the years 18, but as an episode in a prolonged historical process≺merican society's adjustment to the consequences of the Civil War and emancipation. Yet no convincing overall portrait of the quality of political and social life emerged from their writings. The revisionists of the 1960s effectively established a series of negative points: the Reconstruction governments were not as bad as had been portrayed, black supremacy was a myth, the Radicals were not cynical manipulators of the freedmen. An old interpretation has been overthrown, but a coherent new synthesis has yet to take its place. Eric Foner Contends That Reconstruction Did Not Go Far Enough (1983) Eric Foner Contends That Reconstruction Did Not Go Far Enough (1983)ĭespite the excellence of recent writing and the continual expansion of our knowledge of the period, historians of Reconstruction today face a unique dilemma.
0 kommentar(er)
