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The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction

Online ISBN:
9781469617596
Print ISBN:
9781469617572
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction

Mark Wahlgren Summers
Mark Wahlgren Summers
University of Kentucky
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Published online:
22 January 2015
Published in print:
27 October 2014
Online ISBN:
9781469617596
Print ISBN:
9781469617572
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

For the past several decades, scholarship on the Reconstruction era has placed the struggles of the recently enslaved for a meaningful freedom at the center of discussions about the period's policies, successes, and failures. But this book synthesizes and reorients the existing scholarship to focus on the loyal citizenry that imposed Reconstruction and the defeated Confederates who had to come to terms with it. Arguing that by war's end, the chief aim of Reconstruction was to unite permanently the nation and to end slavery without sacrificing the basic political framework of Republican democracy, the book shows that, indeed, these aims were met, and with greater success than could have been expected in 1865. Foregrounding what Reconstruction meant for the white citizenry of the time, this book views Reconstruction not simply as a tragic moment when chances for racial accommodation and progress were frittered away but also as a period when Union and emancipation were successfully affirmed and when critical groundwork was laid for the development of the nation into the twentieth century.

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