(March 5, 2108) Fred Ray at the TOCWOC Blog wrote the review below on my Southern Reconstruction book.
Reconstruction in the South has become a subject dominated these days mostly by academics writing about race and America’s “unfinished revolution,” as viewed through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. However, there is much more to it than that. New England and the South had been rivals since Revolutionary times, and when the shooting stopped in 1865 the Yankees had a glittering prize—control, perhaps permanent, of their old rival. It was simple—the former Confederates (which included pretty much all the male population) would be disenfranchised, and their former slaves enfranchised. They, along with the much smaller number of Union loyalists (who would never be enough by themselves) would provide a permanent majority in the troublesome South. However, it didn’t work out quite that way, and it led to an era just as divisive, in many ways, as the war that proceeded it.
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President Lincoln, unfortunately, had little to say about his plans for reconstructing the South or about Negro voting, which left the field open to the Radical Republicans after his death. Although we consider black citizenship and voting rights a given today, it was certainly not seen that way after the war, and was one of the many issues that led to a struggle between the president and congress. On the one hand was the need for national reconciliation, on the other the rights of freedmen, including the franchise.
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Philip Leigh, two of whose books I have reviewed previously, approaches the subject with a different perspective. Leigh has worked as a computer industry stock analyst, and in addition to a degree in Electrical Engineering has a Masters in Business Administration. This gives him tools that most historians do not have, or indeed may not even be aware exist. In his earlier book Trading With The Enemy, which examined the informal and illegal trade between North and South during the war, he gave a solid economic analysis of the situation and does so here as well, utilizing facts and figures instead of the generalizations so common these days. There have been recent attempts, for instance, to rehabilitate the Carpetbagger governments of Reconstruction, but Leigh is having none of it, showing how corrupt they really were, and how budgets soared during their tenure regardless of the impoverished postwar condition of the states.
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