The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901.

By Heather Cox Richardson. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. [xviii], 312. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00637-2.)

The Death of Reconstruction is an important book on a big topic. It offers a full-scale reinterpretation of the great betrayal of the Civil War's egalitarian legacy, the northern public's abandonment of the freedpeople. If the book is not uniformly persuasive, that partially reflects the scope of its ambitions.

Heather Cox Richardson stresses the centrality of labor issues in understanding northern attitudes toward Reconstruction. After the Civil War, "fear of a perceived black rejection of the free labor ideal, coupled with anxiety over labor unrest," overcame wartime sympathy for the freedpeople (p. xiv). The northerners jettisoned "the midcentury vision of an egalitarian free labor society," so far as the freedpeople were concerned (p. xiv). While Richardson concedes racism had much to do with the eventual outcome, her emphasis is on fears of class warfare and social disorder--and how they affected white northern perceptions of black behavior. In essence, Parisian Communards and a politically corrupt working class pushed well-off northerners into the arms of white southerners.

This is a reasonable thesis, and the book has much else to recommend it. One could easily assign it to undergraduates, it is so straightforwardly written. Richardson effectively frames the study with Booker T. Washington's contention that blacks were productive workers and resistant to union organizing, as a bid for Yankee favor. She also makes the useful decision to employ South Carolina as her paradigmatic case, for the Palmetto State's example was to serve in the northern press as a frightening instance of political power exercised by the black masses. This technique does focus the reader's attention on her core issues; moreover, the book's basic operating assumption--that one can trace attitudes toward the South through the northern popular press--seems plausible.

Despite all these positive features, some questions suggest themselves. This is a thesis-driven book, and one suspects the labor emphasis is being driven hard. For example, Richardson suggests that slaves' wartime labor performance transformed northern racial attitudes, as opposed to, say, the battlefield prowess of black troops or other alternative explanations (pp. 10-11). She also argues that, immediately after the war, Republicans "largely ignor[ed] Northern black workers" (p. 38). Perhaps they ignored them as laborers per se, but suffrage initiatives and other civil rights efforts were common, and Republicans pursued them at considerable political risk. The Republican electorate became more supportive of civil rights year by year, as Robert R. Dykstra's Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 1993) demonstrated in compelling detail for Iowa.

These small instances suggest the more basic issue. It is difficult, based on Richardson's discussion, to distinguish between fears of the black working class and simple racism. In the preface, she argues that "had whites reacted to freedpeople solely on the basis of racism ... their attitudes should have been unaffected by specific events or pieces of legislation" (p. x). True enough, but in the real world, one issue seldom trumps all others; the point is to explain how factors interact. Richardson concludes that "Northerners turned against African-Americans not because of racism.... [but] because African-Americans came to represent a concept of society and government that would destroy the free labor world" (p. 245). This may be correct, but Richardson's relentless pursuit of the argument diminishes one' s confidence that she has the precise balance right. Had she engaged more explicitly with the existing literature on labor and race, it might have helped redress the problem. This is a fine, significant book, but it would have been strengthened by a more nuanced exploration of its important thesis.

MICHAEL W. FITZGERALD
St. Olaf College