| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901. By Heather Cox Richardson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xviii, 312 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00637-2.)

The Death of Reconstruction expands our understanding of the North during the generation following emancipation. Reading broadly in the region's newspapers, magazines, and popular books, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the story of southern Reconstruction that was available to literate northerners. This popular account, she argues, explains why northern sympathizers deserted the former slaves. These often partisan media initially depicted the freedpeople as good workers who subscribed to free labor principles and a harmony of interest between labor and capital, in this regard comparing favorably with strike-prone laboring Democrats who regarded capital as their natural enemy. Soon, however, observers began to wonder whether universal male suffrage would sustain the free labor vision or instead enfranchise workers who would champion collective entitlements rather than individual liberties. The rise of a "labor interest" among black southerners rattled northern Republicans, who feared that the freedpeople were coming under the sway of demagogues. . . .

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