Richardson (history, MIT) continues the work she started in her first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth, which focused on how the Republican ideal of "free labor" shaped Union legislation during the Civil War. This ideal held that through hard work and persistence any man could advance in American society and that laissez-faire government was the best way to promote economic growth. Her new book focuses on the inadequacies and na vet of this agrarian ideal for a complex, war-torn nation with four million disenfranchised former slaves, a huge wartime federal government, and a bitter and demoralized Southern white population. Richardson argues that the Republican Party failed to change its ideology as the nation moved from essentially a rural nation of small farms to an industrialized, urban nation. She makes extensive use of contemporary newspaper articles, periodicals, speeches, and personal accounts to capture this tumultuous era in American history. Highly recommended for academic libraries. Robert Flatley, Frostburg State Univ., MD Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
In The Death of Reconstruction the author's main concern is with attitudes in the North, not in the states of the former Confederacy. She notes that most Northerners had little direct contact with blacks, because only 10 percent of them lived in the North. In the years immediately after the war, the Republican press in the North took a benign view of blacks as a group, portraying them as poor but eager to work their way to prosperity as free labor...The most interesting aspect of this book is the reminder it affords that the debate over "affirmative action" is not a modern phenomenon but can be traced back to the 19th century...[Richardson's] focus on class conflict is a useful addition to other writings on the Gilded Age.
Washington Times - John M. Taylor
At last readers have an explanation of why the Republican Party, founded in antislavery, dedicated to emancipation, and the political inspiration for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, abandoned those causes in favor of an ideology which acquiesced in the disenfranchisement of blacks and in the triumph of Jim Crow. Arguing that Republicans came to see the majority of African Americans as potential labor radicals in the tradition of the Paris Commune and the labor agitation of the US strikes of the late 19th century, [Richardson]...documents that this led to political abandonment...This is an important contribution for all historians who want a better understanding of the South or the African American experience, and anyone who wants good political history.
Heather Richardson's The Death of Reconstruction is a work of genuine originality and imagination. Steeped in remarkable research, this is a persuasive account of how economic world views drove Northerners' retreat from Reconstruction; it makes us view Reconstruction from a different angle and helps explain, as well as any book has, the deep significance of individualism in American life in the late nineteenth century.
The Death of Reconstruction offers a provocative explanation of why Northerners after the Civil War gradually and often reluctantly abandoned their efforts on behalf of the Southern freedmen. Not ignoring virulent racism directed at African Americans, Richardson shows that it was less race than class that brought about the end of Reconstruction. An important, impressively documented book, The Death of Reconstruction is a work comparable to David Montgomery's Beyond Equality as a major reinterpretation of the post-Civil War period.
In The Death of Reconstruction the author's main concern is with attitudes in the North, not in the states of the former Confederacy. She notes that most Northerners had little direct contact with blacks, because only 10 percent of them lived in the North. In the years immediately after the war, the Republican press in the North took a benign view of blacks as a group, portraying them as poor but eager to work their way to prosperity as free labor...The most interesting aspect of this book is the reminder it affords that the debate over "affirmative action" is not a modern phenomenon but can be traced back to the 19th century...[Richardson's] focus on class conflict is a useful addition to other writings on the Gilded Age.--John M. Taylor "Washington Times" (9/30/2001 12:00:00 AM)The Death of Reconstruction offers a provocative explanation of why Northerners after the Civil War gradually and often reluctantly abandoned their efforts on behalf of the Southern freedmen. Not ignoring virulent racism directed at African Americans, Richardson shows that it was less race than class that brought about the end of Reconstruction. An important, impressively documented book, The Death of Reconstruction is a work comparable to David Montgomery's Beyond Equality as a major reinterpretation of the post-Civil War period.--David Herbert Donald, author of Lincoln The Death of Reconstruction is a work of genuine originality and imagination. Steeped in remarkable research, this is a persuasive account of how economic world views drove Northerners' retreat from Reconstruction; it makes us view Reconstruction from a different angle and helps explain, as well as any book has, the deep significance of individualism in American life in the late nineteenth century.--David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
At last readers have an explanation of why the Republican Party, founded in antislavery, dedicated to emancipation, and the political inspiration for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, abandoned those causes in favor of an ideology which acquiesced in the disenfranchisement of blacks and in the triumph of Jim Crow. Arguing that Republicans came to see the majority of African Americans as potential labor radicals in the tradition of the Paris Commune and the labor agitation of the US strikes of the late 19th century, [Richardson]...documents that this led to political abandonment...This is an important contribution for all historians who want a better understanding of the South or the African American experience, and anyone who wants good political history.
In The Death of Reconstruction the author's main concern is with attitudes in the North, not in the states of the former Confederacy. She notes that most Northerners had little direct contact with blacks, because only 10 percent of them lived in the North. In the years immediately after the war, the Republican press in the North took a benign view of blacks as a group, portraying them as poor but eager to work their way to prosperity as free labor...The most interesting aspect of this book is the reminder it affords that the debate over "affirmative action" is not a modern phenomenon but can be traced back to the 19th century...[Richardson's] focus on class conflict is a useful addition to other writings on the Gilded Age.
