and greedy Northerners. What Reconstruction meant to the different participants, whether it was a sound strategy, whether it would have been more (or less) effective if Lincoln had lived, whether it might have been handled in a different way so that race relations could have been more peaceable in the 20th century - the answers to all of these questions have changed in the years since Reconstruction ended.
Lincoln himself began Reconstruction with a proclamation of amnesty in 1863, indicating not so much his foreknowledge of victory by the Union forces but his prescience over how difficult would be the road to reunification. His call to "some persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States and to reinaugurate loyal state governments" seems, in retrospect, to be the frailest reed upon which to hang so very daunting an enterprise.1
Swierenga notes that from the period of Reconstruction itself through the middle of this century, both Civil War and Reconstruction history tended to be in what he calls the "sectionalist" mode.2
These histories focused on the trauma inflicted on the country and on individuals by the Civil War and viewed the era of Reconstruction in a post-diluvian sense, a period of history enacted by the survivors of the war, an era created by the walking wounded of the War Between the States. This picture of Reconstruction is an almost purely reactive one: the 1870s were a reaction to the war, carpetbaggery was a reaction to former slave-holding, etc. The major problem with this particular paradigm of Civil War and Reconstruction era history is that it is an ahistorical one. Because the Civil War was most certainly a very dramatic example of sectionalism (although of course it was also other things) then all events in the years fairly immediately preceding the Civil War must also have been marked by sectionalism and so the Reconstruction, as the aftermath of a sectarian ...