Volume 35, Number 8 · May 12, 1988
Unfinished Business
By C. Vann Woodward
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
by Eric Foner
Harper and Row, 690 pp., $29.95
The way we think, write about, explain, and interpret Reconstruction comes in thirty-year cycles. The first cycle, beginning in the 1870s, was too much an aspect of Reconstruction itself to qualify as an interpretation of its history. Rather it was part of that history. The second cycle, starting around 1900, served as a rationalization for the abandonment of Reconstruction in the North and its overthrow in the South. The estranged two regions reconciled their differences at the expense of the freedmen's rights and the reputation of the Radicals, such as Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, and Edwin M. Stanton, who sought to guarantee for blacks the rights won by the war.
Review, 4858 words
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