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Summary Of New View Of Reconstruction By Eric Foner

833 Words4 Pages

The post civil war era was an extremely complicated time for the United States: the Radical Republicans, Democrats, and newly freed blacks were all influential groups at the time, and the Southern states were attempting to recover both socially and governmentally after their defeat in the civil war. Due to the complex nature of the period, historians have long debated what Reconstruction truly incorporated. In the Article ‘New View of Reconstruction,’ the author Eric Foner evaluates historians ever-changing view on the topic of Reconstruction; criticizing the traditional interpretation and questioning its scholarly legitimacy. Foner instead asserts that Reconstruction was a failure: not due to black political dominance thrust upon the southern …show more content…

This is because the Blacks were the “central participants in the drama of reconstruction.”(165) Therefore, by ignoring their testimony, historians thereby sacrificed all scholarly objectivity; thus creating an interpretation of reconstruction that was extremely biased. According to Foner, this bias was the result of southern whites attempting to preserve their traditional way of life. In fact, he believes that the traditional novelistic portrait of reconstruction-depicting southern whites as heros-was so popular because it “accorded with the political and social realities of the first half of the century.”(165) Foner believes that Reconstruction served as a way for southerners to recreate their society of white supremacy, and the traditional interpretation of this period stood as an indictment of the ideals inherited from pre-civil war society. Due to the flawed nature of this interpretation, its “demise was inevitable.”(165) As a result, scholars soon began reevaluating the traditional interpretation, later rejecting it as a whole. The most “monumental” early revaluation, …show more content…

Post Civil War Reconstruction was an extremely complicated endeavor, and was further complicated by the presence of freed slave population. According to Du bois, Reconstruction was “a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization. Add to all this the presence of four million freedmen and the situation is even more complicated.”(Du Bois) The South not only had to fix their broken society, but also were burdened with supporting the freedman population. Because of this, granting equality for all of the freedman would have been very difficult. Nevertheless, Foner is still correct. The reason being that southerners never made an effort to construct a society based on

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