Forever in Struggle

Eric Foner. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Illus. ed. and commentary by Joshua Brown. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. xxx + 268 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.50.

Here is an invaluable and timely book about a subject central to U.S. history and still of obvious significance today—slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, and both the immediate aftermath and longer-term consequences of those things. During the last forty years or so, scholars have produced a tremendous body of high-quality literature illuminating these and related subjects. But, as Eric Foner notes, "cutting-edge scholarship . . . takes a long time to percolate into the broader culture" (p. xxvii). A work of synthesis, Forever Free aims to accelerate that percolation by helping to bring the results of those scholarly labors out of university libraries and classrooms and before a larger reading public.

As the book's prologue makes clear, this is a book primarily about Reconstruction. The core text is composed of seven chapters and an epilogue. Its first chapter, on the origins, purpose, and nature of African-American slavery, appears here not only because the South's "peculiar institution" caused the Civil War and Reconstruction but also "because the institutions former slaves created during Reconstruction and the values and aspirations they articulated in the aftermath of emancipation had their roots in the slave experience" (p. xxx). The second chapter looks at the Civil War and wartime emancipation. Five chapters then detail the history of Reconstruction—its rise, achievements, and eventual overturn. The last of those five also reviews the later imposition of formal disfranchisement and legalized segregation because without such a review the long-term meaning of Reconstruction's defeat for the status and conditions of the African-American population is seriously and dangerously obscured. An epilogue quickly surveys the story's sequel, from the Jim Crow era down to the present.

Joshua Brown selected and captioned the pictorial images that copiously illustrate this text. Brown also authored six visual essays that demonstrate and analyze historical changes in mainstream artistic depiction of African Americans, from the antebellum era through the early decades of the twentieth century. The juxtaposition between Foner's narrative and Brown's images and commentary is powerful, and the two authors' partnership is a fortunate one. Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, is the outstanding modern student of the Reconstruction period. Among his many books are a number centered specifically on that subject, including Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (1993), and, of course, the authoritative synthesis, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), an abbreviated version of which appeared in 1990.¹ Joshua Brown is the executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He is a leading authority on the visual representation of historical themes, especially those set in nineteenth-century America. He is the author of the fascinating Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (2002) and served as visual editor of the textbook, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (2nd ed., 2000).

Until the 1960s, the dominant academic view of the antebellum South and the Civil War era was the one propounded by Columbia University's Professor William A. Dunning and his graduate students. As they saw it, slavery was a benevolent and mutually beneficial arrangement that southern whites would in due course have brought to a gradual and peaceful conclusion. But the North, for its own venal reasons, nonetheless propelled the nation into sectional war. During that war, slaves demonstrated their affection and appreciation for southern white masters by loyally laboring on behalf of the Confederate cause. Eventually succumbing nonetheless to overwhelming...