ABSTRACT
His words are as true now as they were then. Reconstruction witnessed a hugely significant episode in American history. The need to bring the nation back together after four years of bloody civil war and to deal with the racial questions which emerged from emancipation provided massive tasks for the American body politic and a unique epoch in the history of the United States. One historian has referred to Reconstruction as the ‘Bermuda Triangle of American history, a place where we lose our bearings, where the usual American stories of progress and success simply do not work’.2 A tangled web of hope and failure, of reconciliation and rebellion, the period produced a myriad of questions, some answered and many unanswered. Not surprisingly there is a mass of literature on the intricacies and impact of the Reconstruction period. A comprehensive survey of this work would, I fear, be beyond the brevity of this essay. As a consequence we will focus on the impact of Reconstruction on the freedman. This spotlight will further illuminate one of the main themes of this volume, namely the progress of racial equality and the development of American citizenship. Furthermore, it will point to the most important area of promise and disappointment for America during the history of Reconstruction. The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a history of
Reconstruction that would dominate the historiography of the period for the next four decades or more. Drawing on the themes of
scholarship in the late nineteenth century, William Dunning’s Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 presented a negative view of the period. Of particular importance for the focus of this chapter, Dunning was extremely critical of the attempt by radical Republican ‘carpetbaggers’ and their southern ‘scalawag’ allies to force black suffrage on the white South. Dunning was scathing in his criticism of Republican idealism, ignoring his editor’s pencilling out of his attack on the radical Charles Sumner and painting a picture of Reconstruction as tragic and flawed.3 Although he was determined not to impose a master interpretation on his students, his influence was such that a ‘Dunning school’ of Reconstruction emerged. This school viewed the period as ‘black’, both metaphorically and literally in terms of AfricanAmerican domination of southern Republican governments.4
