Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (review)

Often, authors approach writing book reviews as a chore or an obligation. In contrast, I began reading Forever Free by Eric Foner, with visual essays by Joshua Brown, by anticipating both a thorough education and a pleasant read. I was disappointed in neither. Building on a half-century of scholarship meant to overthrow the racially biased histories of the Reconstruction Era that persist in popular culture, Foner argues persuasively that African Americans took the opportunities provided for them during the period after the Civil War to develop beneficial institutions, construct new economies, and progressively lead local and state governments while contributing to critical national debates. As scholars now know, a desire for a rapprochement between Northern and Southern whites terminated the experiment in full equality for African Americans, creating myths about carpetbaggers, scalawags, and "home rule." Foner's synthesis of decades' worth of research into long-forgotten political records and popular culture destroys any remaining myths we may have had about the harm supposedly greedy Northerners and incompetent African Americans caused to supposedly poor, defenseless white Southerners during the postwar years.

Foner, America's deservedly preeminent historian of the Reconstruction Era, opens the book with a chapter about the years leading up to the Civil War. In this chapter, he builds a case for the competence of African Americans who had had decades of experience protecting families, organizing churches, participating in market economies (slaves were often allotted small plots upon which they could grow fruits and vegetables for market), and even developing literacy. Simultaneously, he argues that Northern whites had become increasingly open-minded about black claims to equality, as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln's shift toward emancipation. The chapter on African American participation in Union efforts during the Civil War gives further evidence to the competence of blacks while illustrating how whites learned to respect black heroism. Thus, Lincoln felt that granting suffrage to black soldiers was warranted. The third and subsequent chapters cast light on how America not only took land as well as dignity, honor, and other intangibles from Indians and Mexicans but from African Americans as well. Indeed, if opinions about the current debate over the payment of reparations to the descendents of slaves are not tempered or changed by this chapter, then readers must not have read it closely.

Yet even amidst broken promises, Ku Klux Klan violence, and the failure of interracial political coalitions, there is hope in the middle chapters. African Americans built churches, schools, and other civic institutions, voted in elections at astonishing participation rates, and were elected to local and national offices. Of course, the sad history of this period inevitably forms the backdrop for Foner's concluding chapter. By the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Supreme Court had entirely abandoned the promise of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments in the Plessy v. Fergusson decision (1896), Northern whites had grown tired of defending Southern black rights, and Southern whites had imposed their biased history upon a nation that wanted to forget the Civil War and move on to a new imperial mission (as exemplified by the Spanish American War of 1898), a shift nicely captured by Brown's final visual essay. Foner's epilogue (along with the conclusion of Brown's last essay) provides a glimmer of hope through an analysis of the Civil Rights era of the 1960s that ends with a parallel development: a new retreat from civil rights and the Republican Party's "southern strategy" that has reaffirmed racist attitudes though couched in the language of equality.

Any qualms I have with the book are based on its nature and thus are limited. As a synthetic work, Foner sometimes misses cutting-edge scholarship as when he perpetuates myths about slave rebellions (especially Vesey's and potentially Gabriel's) from the era previous to his own scholarship. Moreover, this work does not reflect new methods that examine multiple identities, though Foner does briefly include gender, class...