Reconstruction, the post Civil War effort to re integrate the states of the defeated Confederacy into the United States, and to reform the economy and society of the South to fit a new world without slavery, is at once one of the most familiar and least understood chapters of American history. It gave the American language the term "carpetbagger," among others.1 The popular image of Reconstruction is still essentially that of Gone With The Wind: of enduring white Southerners trying to put their lives together in the shadow of outside rule and endemic corruption.
In fact, Reconstruction was America's first, abortive Civil Rights era. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation officially freed the slaves those in the Confederacy, at least, where it had no direct force; slaves in Union territory were not freed but in fact slavery was effectively ended by the fact of the Civil War itself, as many Southerners realized long before 18652 But while slavery itself was moribund before Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the future of the freed blacks was left unsettled by the end of the Confederacy. Likewise unsettled was the future of the entire Southern social, economic, and political order of which the "peculiar institution" had been the central and defining feature.
1Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xi. A carpetbagger was originally a Northerner who went South to engage in politics and in Southern legend to profiteer during Reconstruction. The term has often been generalized to mean any outsider who moves in order to dominate an area's politics. Its sister term, "scalawag," a Reconstruction era Southern Republican, has not gained such general currency.
2Eric Foner, Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 3 4. These great questions were to be settled by Reconstruction, a process which began under ...