ABSTRACT
Real understanding of the economic and social forces which lay behind the Civil War and which came to head in the years immediately following was long frustrated by passionate sectional animosity and racial prejudice. Too many professional historians the "forty acres and a mule" slogan of the black peasantry has been only a source of amusement. Mr. Allen is right in saying that a dictatorship, whether of black or white labor was impossible in the post-bellum agrarian South. That only dictatorship that existed at this time was that of the triumphant bourgeoisie represented in Congress by the Committee of Fifteen. Both radical and conservative Republicans represented the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie of the North. The confiscation and division of property ran counter to their conception of democracy. Thaddeus Steven's radicalism, like that of all revolutionary figures, was no doubt deeply psychoanalytical in origin. But a diagnosis of his subconscious springs of action hardly reveals his stature or his wisdom.
