Rating: 
Summary: A lucid and fascinating account of one of America's most com
Review: How any reviewer (see below) can suggest that Eric Foner draws conclusions from a lack of evidence is beyond comprehension. Undoubtedly this generations defining interpretation of this period, Foner provides a mass of evidence to support his very balanced and well-informed conclusions. His book makes for fascinating reading for the layman and trained historian alike, and to suggest that W.E.B. Du Bois' work (as magesterial as it is) can only be understood from the historiogrpahical climate it was reacting against (the radically racist Dunning School). Foner draws on a wealth of research since the turn of the century to provide a fascinating and invaluable account. I would recommend it to anyone with any real interest in this period which has helped define the progress of political discourse to the present day.
Rating: 
Summary: State's Rights vs. Slaves' Rights
Review: I believe it was Charles Beard who first called the American Civil War "The Second American Revolution". Although he was chiefly concerned with the shift in the balance of power from the Southern slaveholders to the Industrial North, modern historians who agree with him see emancipation and the rise of black rights as among the most revolutionary events in American History.
Eric Foner's work is strictly within this tradition. Beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Foner traces the evolution of Reconstruction politics, policies and philosophy. For Abraham Lincoln, Reconstruction was a war measure, an experimental, evolving policy designed to coerce and seduce the South into surrender, and to consolidate emancipation. Only after Appomattox, in his final speech, did Lincoln publicly endorse limited Black suffrage.
But for Radical Republicans, during and after the war, reconstruction was part of a grander scheme, consciously revolutionary. The Radicals wanted to destroy the rebel Slaveholding South, and to build a new South, led by former slaves, freeborn blacks, and genuine Southern unionists. Going as far as attempting to impeach President Andrew Johnson, whose 'Presidential Reconstruction' practically surrendered Southern states back to the rebels, Radicals undermined the Johnson based regimes, and made sweeping legislation that gave civil rights to the blacks. The fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right to votes to blacks, surrendered more ground to Nativist and anti-Feminist politics then to Anti-black sentiments (pp. 446-447).
The only issue upon which Congress failed to enact Radical proposals was land redistribution. The failure to give blacks ownership of the land ensured that the slaveholding classes, although weakened, still dominated Southern life, and in time they were to reestablish control over the South.
Eric Foner's 'Reconstruction' is, in effect, two books combined as one. As a political history of America in the decade or so after the war, it is a masterful account, weaving together social, economic, cultural and political elements. Although Foner is no master of prose, his writing is clear and his logic sound. At the same time, the book is also a social history of the South during Reconstruction and Redemption.
Maybe I just dislike social history, but there are several chapters which could have been significantly shortened with little loss to the narrative. Like much social history I've read, Foner rarely attempts to quantify his conclusions, and the results are often a one line description, followed by a list of illustrations. Entirely typical are sections such as this:
'... Republican governors initially employed their influence to defeat civil rights bills... fearing that such measures threaten the attempt to establish their administration's legitimacy by wooing white support. ... Governor Alcron [of Mississippi] vetoed a bill barring railroads charted by the state from discriminating against black. In 1872, a measure imposing criminal penalties upon ... discrimination passed the legislature... but was mysteriously lost or stolen on its way to the executive mansion and thus failed to become law. Florida Gov. Harrison Reed in 1868 vetoed a bill guaranteeing equal treatment on public conveyances, and Warmoth twice rejected civil rights measures passed by the Louisiana legislature.' (p. 370)
As Southern blacks were battling for their economic and political rights, the Second American Revolution increasingly raised new issues that redrew Northern and national political alliances. The public grew agitated over Corruption, Labour relations and the choice between fiat or metal currencies. Initially, the support for Reconstruction was the one unifying plank of all Republicans, but as Southern opposition to Reconstruction did not dwindle, the Northern enthusiasm for supporting black's rights with the bayonet waned.
In 1870 and 1871, the Grant administration's crack down on the Ku Klux Klan was both effective and popular among Republicans. But as Republicans identified themselves with other issues (chiefly monetary conservatism), Federal support for Reconstruction governments and military intervention in the South became controversial and politically damaging in the North. By the 1876 election, Republicans were no longer committed to Reconstruction, and Redemption (the return to the old order) triumphed in the South, with the reemergence of the Jim Crow regime and the Herrenvolk democracy.
Although Reconstruction was not without lasting achievements, the Southern Counter-revolution undermined much of the political, economic and social advances that blacks won during the Reconstruction era. Furthermore, the Redeemer platforms of small governments, fixed labor relations and white supremacy spelled economic stagnation for Southern whites as well as blacks (p. 597).
Isolated circumstances not withstanding, the movement towards equal rights for blacks, commenced in the Reconstruction era, was not really resumed until the 1930s, and was only completed, if at all, by Civil Rights movement of 1950s and 1960s. As Foner's subtitle indicated, Reconstruction was, and arguably still is, America's Unfinished Revolution
Rating:
Summary: Great survey of the Reconstruction period
Review: I found Reconstruction immensely readable, and easy to understand by the layman reader. If anyone thinks we live in an intensely polarized political climate now, pick up this book. The most enlightening aspect of Foner's work, however, is in relation to how much scholarship on Reconstruction has changed. As an interesting exercise, read Claude Bowers' The Tragic Era, then W.E.B. du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America, then Foner's Reconstruction.
Rating: 
Summary: History or politics?
Review: I was extremely disappointed in Foner's book. Historians are supposed to do extensive research to discover as many facts as they can. Then they are supposed to attempt to resolve inconsistencies and conflicts in their research, before they finally weave together their "version" of what they believe happened and why. Unfortunately, many modern historians jump to a conclusion and only research and report on those facts which support their conclusion. Foner belongs in this camp.This is not a history of reconstruction. Instead, it is Foner's "essay" on what he would want us to believe. I would not read it. If you desire a better version, with a black bias, on the reconstruction era, read WEB Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk. It is as accurate at the turn of this century as it was about the turn of the last.
Rating: 
Summary: Great indepth book on a very confusing period!
Review: This book sums up the post Civil War period. The South and how it dealt with the Reconstruction Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. Very well researched!
Rating:
Summary: Another lineage feed the crow?
Review: This is an extremely penetrating, yet low key, history of the reconstructed history of Reconstruction, rescued from the legacy of massive distortion in the century-old genre, beginning in the birth times of Jim Crow and the loss of the hopes of the 'second American Revolution'. All one can say is that it might have been worse, the Union might have sundered. The book details all the phases, good and bad, from the birth of the Klu Klux to the great depression of the seventies, and the loss of focus on the task to be completed.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: This is one of those books you can't put down. It takes you through the history of reconstruction, the political fighting, how it played out locally, and how it played out in the elections.
And at the end you realize, this country was on the cusp of moving forward on race. We had it. It wasn't perfect but progress was being made.
And it was all defeated because the republicans hoped to win elections in the south by supporting the old power structure. And so the blacks were sacrificed for votes - and the republicans didn't get the votes anyways.
Absolutely engrossing.
Rating:
Summary: Radically Lost
Review: This is one of those histories that reminds you how wonderful it is to be safely out of school. Guess who Professor Foner has decided to blame for the "failure" of Reconstruction? The former slaveholders of the South whose descendants still argue that the "Civil War was not about slavery"? The 1840s immigrants from Europe whose racism was so deep and bitter that it led to the worst riot in American history (the New York City draft riots of 1864)? Of course not. It was the Republican party - those awful people who brought us the 14th and 15th Amendments. The unpolitically correct fact Professor Foner avoids is that the Union Army was the only effective force in favor of black equality after the Civil War. State and local governments - both North and South - were indifferent or hostile to the exercise of liberty by blacks and native Americans. The Freedman's Bureau was only able to do its job because those terrible people in the U.S. Army enforced what we now call civil rights. Foner is so eager to avoid giving the Army its due that he fails to mention that its leader - Ulysses Grant - was the only President before Eisenhower to believe in black equality as Constitutional right. Without Grant there would have been no Reconstruction. When he left office (out of deference to the tradition that no President should serve more terms than the 1st one), Reconstruction was finished. It is a measure of Grant's personal popularity that Americans respected his "naive" belief in fundamental equality of all Americans even if a majority of the electorate - North and South - did not share it. It is a measure of the unpopularity of civil rights among white Americans that it has taken more than a century for Grant's reputation to begin to recover from the presumption that only a drunk could think black people were equal. Black people "failed" to gain political equality after the Civil War because the white Americans who had immigrated to the U.S. since 1840 and those who came after the Civil War joined with defeated Southerners to form a political alliance - the "modern" Democratic party - that overwhelmed the Republicans who had passed the 14th and 15th Amendments. To accept the arguments of Foner and his admiring reviewers is to perpetuate the comfortable "radical" fantasy that but for those awful capitalists peace and harmony would be just around the corner. Readers who are interested in the actual, tragic history of Reconstruction would be well-advised to read Stetson Kennedy's After Appomatox:How the South Won the Civil War and Brooks Simpson's Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861-1868.
Rating:
Summary: Radically Lost
Review: This is one of those histories that reminds you how wonderful it is to be safely out of school. Guess who Professor Foner has decided to blame for the "failure" of Reconstruction? The former slaveholders of the South whose descendants still argue that the "Civil War was not about slavery"? The 1840s immigrants from Europe whose racism was so deep and bitter that it led to the worst riot in American history (the New York City draft riots of 1864)? Of course not. It was the Republican party - those awful people who brought us the 14th and 15th Amendments. The unpolitically correct fact Professor Foner avoids is that the Union Army was the only effective force in favor of black equality after the Civil War. State and local governments - both North and South - were indifferent or hostile to the exercise of liberty by blacks and native Americans. The Freedman's Bureau was only able to do its job because those terrible people in the U.S. Army enforced what we now call civil rights. Foner is so eager to avoid giving the Army its due that he fails to mention that its leader - Ulysses Grant - was the only President before Eisenhower to believe in black equality as Constitutional right. Without Grant there would have been no Reconstruction. When he left office (out of deference to the tradition that no President should serve more terms than the 1st one), Reconstruction was finished. It is a measure of Grant's personal popularity that Americans respected his "naive" belief in fundamental equality of all Americans even if a majority of the electorate - North and South - did not share it. It is a measure of the unpopularity of civil rights among white Americans that it has taken more than a century for Grant's reputation to begin to recover from the presumption that only a drunk could think black people were equal. Black people "failed" to gain political equality after the Civil War because the white Americans who had immigrated to the U.S. since 1840 and those who came after the Civil War joined with defeated Southerners to form a political alliance - the "modern" Democratic party - that overwhelmed the Republicans who had passed the 14th and 15th Amendments. To accept the arguments of Foner and his admiring reviewers is to perpetuate the comfortable "radical" fantasy that but for those awful capitalists peace and harmony would be just around the corner. Readers who are interested in the actual, tragic history of Reconstruction would be well-advised to read Stetson Kennedy's After Appomatox:How the South Won the Civil War and Brooks Simpson's Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction 1861-1868.
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