As scholars now know, a desire for a rapprochement between Northern and Southern whites terminated the experiment in full equality for African Americans, creating myths about carpetbaggers, scalawags, and "home rule." Foner's synthesis of decades' worth of research into long-forgotten political records and popular culture destroys any remaining myths we may have had about the harm supposedly greedy Northerners and incompetent African Americans caused to supposedly poor, defenseless white Southerners during the postwar years.įoner, America's deservedly preeminent historian of the Reconstruction Era, opens the book with a chapter about the years leading up to the Civil War.
Building on a half-century of scholarship meant to overthrow the racially biased histories of the Reconstruction Era that persist in popular culture, Foner argues persuasively that African Americans took the opportunities provided for them during the period after the Civil War to develop beneficial institutions, construct new economies, and progressively lead local and state governments while contributing to critical national debates. In contrast, I began reading Forever Free by Eric Foner, with visual essays by Joshua Brown, by anticipating both a thorough education and a pleasant read. He refutes lingering misconceptions about Reconstruction, including the attribution of its ills to corrupt African American politicians and carpetbaggers, and connects it to the movements for civil rights and racial justice.Often, authors approach writing book reviews as a chore or an obligation. He shows us that the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and renewed acts of racial violence were retaliation for the progress made by blacks soon after the war. Foner makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and-even more actively-in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the black experience to an understanding of the era. From one of our most distinguished historians, a new examination of the vitally important years of Emancipation and Reconstruction during and immediately following the Civil War-a necessary reconsideration that emphasizes the era's political and cultural meaning for today's America.
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